Children today are more disrespectful then in the past. Why is that? What ever happened to respect toward adults and their mandates? The way parents discipline their child could be a big factor in this disrespect. In the last decade or so, science has discovered a tremendous amount about the roles emotion plays in our lives. Emotion goes back to how a parent disciplines his or her child. All parents use different ways to discipline their children. Since children that receive physical punishment tend to have a higher chance to succeed in their life then children that do not get punished physically, parents should find a more positive way to give discipline.
Before a parent disciplines their child, they should understand why the child did what they did. People go through many stages in life. Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget formulated a broad theory of intellectual growth. He gave us different period in which children view their conception of what the world is to them. These periods are called sensory motor period, Preoperational period, and concrete Operations period. Sensory motor starts from the ages of birth through two years old. During the sensory motor period Piaget says, "The child learns to relate motor behavior to environment- (Vasta). The child learns a variety of means-to-end relations such as that manipulating a light switch leads to light or that crying leads to a parent's presence (Vasta). The child is very interested in everything.
The next period, Preoperational period, starts from age of two to the age of seven. The child learns to use symbols to represent other events, but yet they lack basic operations for using them (Vasta). For example the child may be able to know the numbers 1, 2, and 3 but may not know addition or subtraction. Author Vasta states that, "The child is thus dependent on immediate perceptions rather than logic in interpreting the world- (Vasta). A child is given two eight ounce tubes of water and is ask which tube has the most water in it.
